English Verb Origins?

I don't know of any languages that use verb infinitives like English does: to run, to have, to read, topost. From what I remember, Japanese, Mandarin, French, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Latin, and Greek all have one word verbs. But such verbs in English are rare. Can you think of any? "Can" comes to mind....
English also conjugates verbs differently. All the examples I can think of have two forms, except for to be with three: I run, You run, He runs, we run, they run. Compared to romantic language's conjugational endings.
Where did this come from? Is it something magical that English made up while being isolated on it's island, or is there a family of languages somewhere that uses verbs like English does?

@"is": http://www.scientificpsychic.com/grammar/to_be.html

I don't think you attach anything to "is."

French verbs in their intransitive form (unattached to an object) are considered to be prefaced by "to".

From my limited knowledge of French, "to"less infinitives are common.
I like to study.
J'aime etudier.

"J'aime a etudier." isn't right in French (right?), but it's what English does. Where did that use come from?

From my limited knowledge of French, "to"less infinitives are common.
I like to study.
J'aime etudier.

"J'aime a etudier." isn't right in French (right?), but it's what English does. Where did that use come from?

The "to" is considered a part of the word, as far as I remember. In etudier, the "er" is the same as "to"; when conjugated, the "to" is lost.

EDIT: I wasn't reading the question correctly. I think it's either Old English or Germanic...

English is heavily Germanic in origin, so I'd start there. Also, the origin of words is called etymology, and the origin of languages is called glottogony.

Using the English "to" in other languages isn't common, but it is part of the rules with some parts of speech. Consider the Spanish present progressive tense:

I am going to study.
Voy a estudiar.

Or, you can use the passive voice:

In order to study well, it's important to have complete silence
Para estudiar bien, es importante que tener silencio total

I skimmed the thread, but all I wanted to say is that English is a romance language whose common ancestor is Latin. So perhaps starting there would be a good idea.

English is a romance language whose common ancestor is Latin.

I raged.

English is not a romance language. It's a Germanic language that had influences from Latin. Find me one authoritative source that states that English is definitively a Romance language and I will send you $5. I mean it. Five bucks is yours.

Well...

ORIGINALLY~

England was settled by GERMANS and then the Romans came in and took over and gave them road systems, gave them much of their culture and governing systems, etc. Then they ditched and left the Anglo-Saxans with Roman/Latin influences. So, OLD English is much of a German and Latin mix. (That's a little bit of what I learned in my English class...)


Edit : Here's Wikipedia's information (which is very much right).

 Wikipedia

Old English (Englisc), also called Anglo-Saxon,[1] is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary register of Anglo-Saxon.

It is a West Germanic language and is closely related to Old Frisian. It also experienced heavy influence from Old Norse, a member of the related North Germanic group of languages.

History of the English language
Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of approximately 700 years[2] – from the Anglo-Saxon migrations that created England in the 5th century to some time after the Norman Conquest of 1066 when the language underwent a dramatic transition. During this early period it assimilated some aspects of the languages with which it came in contact, such as the Celtic languages and the two dialects of Old Norse from the invading Vikings, who occupied and controlled large tracts of land in northern and eastern England, which came to be known as the Danelaw.

Germanic origins
The most important force in shaping Old English was its Germanic heritage in its vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar, which it shared with its related languages in continental Europe. Some of these features are shared with the other West Germanic languages with which Old English is grouped, while some other features are traceable to the reconstructed Proto-Germanic language from which all Germanic languages are believed to have derived.

Like other Germanic languages of the period, Old English was fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental, though the instrumental was very rare), which had dual plural forms for referring to groups of two objects (but only in the personal pronouns) in addition to the usual singular and plural forms. It also assigned gender to all nouns, including those that describe inanimate objects: for example, sēo sunne (the Sun) was feminine, while se mōna (the Moon) was masculine (cf. modern German die Sonne and der Mond).

Latin influence
A large percentage of the educated and literate population of the time were competent in Latin, which was the scholarly and diplomatic lingua franca of Europe at the time. It is sometimes possible to give approximate dates for the entry of individual Latin words into Old English based on which patterns of linguistic change they have undergone. There were at least three notable periods of Latin influence. The first occurred before the ancestral Saxons left continental Europe for Britain. The second began when the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity and Latin-speaking priests became widespread.

The third and largest single transfer of Latin-based words happened after the Norman Conquest of 1066, when an enormous number of Norman words began to influence the language. Most of these Oïl language words were themselves derived from Old French and ultimately from classical Latin, although a notable stock of Norse words were introduced or re-introduced in Norman form. The Norman Conquest approximately marks the end of Old English and the advent of Middle English.

One of the ways the influence of Latin can be seen is that many Latin words for activities came to also be used to refer to the people engaged in those activities, an idiom carried over from Anglo-Saxon but using Latin words. This can be seen in words like militia, assembly, movement, and service.

The language was further altered by the transition away from the runic alphabet (also known as futhorc or fuþorc) to the Latin alphabet, which was also a significant factor in the developmental pressures brought to bear on the language. Old English words were spelt as they were pronounced. The "silent" letters in many Modern English words were pronounced in Old English: for example, the c in cniht, the Old English ancestor of the modern knight, was pronounced. Another side-effect of spelling words phonetically was that spelling was extremely variable – the spelling of a word would reflect differences in the phonetics of the writer's regional dialect, and also idiosyncratic spelling choices which varied from author to author, and even from work to work by the same author. Thus, for example, the word and could be spelt either and or ond.

Other Germanic languages with which Old Norse still retained some mutual intelligibilityThe second major source of loanwords to Old English was the Scandinavian words introduced during the Viking invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries. In addition to a great many place names, these consist mainly of items of basic vocabulary, and words concerned with particular administrative aspects of the Danelaw (that is, the area of land under Viking control, which included extensive holdings all along the eastern coast of England and Scotland).

The Vikings spoke Old Norse, a language related to Old English in that both derived from the same ancestral Proto-Germanic language. It is very common for the intermixing of speakers of different dialects, such as those that occur during times of political unrest, to result in a mixed language, and one theory holds that exactly such a mixture of Old Norse and Old English helped accelerate the decline of case endings in Old English.

Apparent confirmation of this is the fact that simplification of the case endings occurred earliest in the north and latest in the southwest, the area farthest away from Viking influence. Regardless of the truth of this theory, the influence of Old Norse on the English language has been profound: responsible for such basic vocabulary items as sky, leg, the pronoun they, the verb form are, and hundreds of other words.

Celtic influence
Traditionally, many maintain that the influence of Celtic on English has been small, citing the small number of Celtic loanwords taken into the language. The number of Celtic loanwords is of a lower order than either Latin or Scandinavian. However, a minority view is that distinctive Celtic traits can be discerned in syntax from the post-Old English period.[3]

Dialects
Old English should not be regarded as a single monolithic entity just as Modern English is also not monolithic. Within Old English, there was language variation. Thus, it is misleading, for example, to consider Old English as having a single sound system. Rather, there were multiple Old English sound systems. Old English has variation along regional lines as well as variation across different times. For example, the language attested in Wessex during the time of Æthelwold of Winchester, which is named Late West Saxon (or Æthelwoldian Saxon), is considerably different from the language attested in Wessex during the time of Alfred the Great's court, which is named Early West Saxon (or Classical West Saxon or Alfredian Saxon). Furthermore, the difference between Early West Saxon and Late West Saxon is of such a nature that Late West Saxon is not directly descended from Early West Saxon (despite what the similarity in name implies).

The four main dialectal forms of Old English were Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West Saxon.[4] Each of those dialects was associated with an independent kingdom on the island. Of these, all of Northumbria and most of Mercia were overrun by the Vikings during the 9th century. The portion of Mercia and all of Kent that were successfully defended were then integrated into Wessex.

After the process of unification of the diverse Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in 878 by Alfred the Great, there is a marked decline in the importance of regional dialects. This is not because they stopped existing; regional dialects continued even after that time to this day, as evidenced both by the existence of Middle and Modern English dialects later on, and by common sense–-people do not spontaneously adopt another dialect when there is a sudden change of political power.


The first page of the Beowulf manuscriptHowever, the bulk of the surviving documents from the Anglo-Saxon period are written in the dialect of Wessex, Alfred's kingdom. It seems likely that with consolidation of power, it became necessary to standardise the language of government to reduce the difficulty of administering the more remote areas of the kingdom. As a result, documents were written in the West Saxon dialect. Not only this, but Alfred was passionate about the spread of the vernacular and brought many scribes to his region from Mercia in order that previously unwritten texts be recorded.[5]

The Church was affected likewise, especially since Alfred initiated an ambitious programme to translate religious materials into English. In order to retain his patronage and ensure the widest circulation of the translated materials, the monks and priests engaged in the programme worked in his dialect. Alfred himself seems to have translated books out of Latin and into English, notably Pope Gregory I's treatise on administration, Pastoral Care

Because of the centralisation of power and the Viking invasions, there is little or no written evidence for the development of non-Wessex dialects after Alfred's unification.

I raged.

English is not a romance language. It's a Germanic language that had influences from Latin. Find me one authoritative source that states that English is definitively a Romance language and I will send you $5. I mean it. Five bucks is yours.

Ah my apologies! I was shown this picture in my Spanish class and must have confused which branch English is located. Though that's no excuse since I'm an English major, but meh, I was never officially taught the origins of the language (yet). Keep your money and don't rage too hard; there are worse mistakes to flip out over ;D.

I don't know of any languages that use verb infinitives like English does: to run, to have, to read, topost.

Where did this come from? Is it something magical that English made up while being isolated on it's island, or is there a family of languages somewhere that uses verbs like English does?

Well, translated into Dutch and German you would get:

to run > te rennen > zu laufen
to have > te hebben > zu haben
to read > te lezen > zu lesen
to post > te posten > zu schicken

Image of all Germanic dialect groups:

 Spoiler

I am going to study.
Voy a estudiar.

That's not quite the same, though, because "voy a" + infinitive is a language construct. The infinitive itself is just "estudiar" and not "a estudiar" (compare "tener que estudiar").

Whereas the infinite in English is "to study" or "to read" or "to run" and not the root word itself.

Another point is that we use the gerund ("studying" "running") rather than the infinitive a lot.

I don't know of any languages that use verb infinitives like English does: to run, to have, to read, topost.

Norwegian:
å løpe, å ha, å lese, å poste
(or)
å springje, å ha, å lese, å sende

Swedish and Danish have the same.

Well, words like can, need, want, etc are called modals in german. They replace the regular verb in the sentence, and move that verd to the end in its infinitive form.

For example:
I study
Ich lerne

I need to study

Ich muss lernen

when you use an infinitive without a modal, you use zu, which means to.

Example:
He goes to the park to run.

Er gehe zu dem Park zu laufen.

As others have said, English is a germanic language so it has a lot more in common with German than the romantic languages.

I always thought English was romantic. :/